Digital marketing strategy builds on and adapts the
principles of traditional marketing, using the opportunities and challenges
offered by technology and the digital medium.
User-centric thinking, which involves placing the
user at the core of all decisions, is vital when looking at building a
successful digital marketing strategy. The advent of new technologies means the
digital marketing strategist of today is offered not only a plethora of new
tactical possibilities, but also unprecedented ways of measuring the
effectiveness of chosen strategies and tactics.
The fact that digital marketing is highly empirical
is one of its key strengths.
Everything can be measured: from behaviours, to
actions and action paths, to results. This means that the digital marketing
strategist should start thinking with return on investment (ROI) in mind. Built
into any strategy should be a testing framework and the ability to remain
flexible and dynamic in a medium that shifts and changes as user behaviours do.
If we define strategy as “a plan of action designed
to achieve a particular outcome”, then the desired outcome from a digital
marketing strategy point of view would be aligned with your organisation’s
overall business objectives. For example, if one of the overall business
objectives is acquisition of new clients, possible digital marketing objectives
might be building brand awareness online.
A tactic differs from a strategy. It is a specific
action or method that contributes to achieving a goal. For example, if the
overall business objective is acquisition and the digital objective is to
increase awareness, a paid search campaign would be a possible tactic towards
achieving this.
Any
activity with an end goal (whether it’s winning a war, building a city or selling a product) should have a blueprint or
map in place for every person in the
organisation to follow in the process of achieving it.
A
strategy needs to cover the questions of who you are, what you are offering and to whom, as well as why and how you are
doing so. The steps and questions below
cover what an organisation should be aware of when creating and implementing a strategy that will meet its
objectives.
The
first step in crafting a successful strategy is to examine the context of the
organisation
and the various stakeholders
.
1.
Context:
- Who are you and what is it about
your identity that makes you useful?
- Who are your customers and what
needs and wants do they have?
- Who are your competitors? These
might extend beyond organisations that compete with you on the basis of price
and product and could also be competition in the form of abstracts such as time
and mindshare.
- What is the context in which you are
operating (social, political and economic
factors) and how is this likely to change in the future?
A SWOT
analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is an ideal way to
understand your business and your market.
Once you
have examined the market situation, the second step is an examination of your
value proposition, in other words, what value your organisation can add to that
market.
2.
Objectives:
Digital
marketing has technology at its heart. It is therefore crucial to involve both
technical and aesthetic minds in the initial stages of strategy formulation.
The
objectives should speak to both system and story and the tools afforded by
technology should be a starting point in the process of developing strategic objectives.
The
second factor to consider when setting objectives is that all channels of a brand
operate as part of a greater whole. Digital marketing objectives should be
aligned with the brand’s greater strategic objectives.
3.
Value-Exchange:
- What value are you adding to the
market, what are you trying to achieve and how will you know if you are
successful?
Digital
can achieve many things in terms of users and value creation. Once you have
defined what constitutes success and have delineated your prime objective, you
can examine other goals that support this objective. For example, if your prime
objective is for people to view the full range of products that your organisation
has to offer, supporting goals could be “we want people to share their comments
to support our range development” or “we want to identify the most enthusiastic
users and recruit them as brand ambassadors”. Exploring all the options before
defining the most specific and focused direction will result in the most
successful direction.
4.
Tactics and Evaluation:
A
diverse variety of digital tools and tactics are available once you have
defined your digital marketing objectives. The strength of the tools is
dependent on the type of objectives set for the brand – for example,
acquisition (or gaining new customers) may be best driven by paid search, while
email is one of the most effective tools for selling more products to existing
customers.
Tactic Outcome
Email
Marketing Customer
Retention
Online
Advertising Branding
and Acquisition
Affiliate
Marketing Sales
and Branding
SEO Customer
Retention and Acquisition
PPC Customer
Retention and Acquisition
Social
Media Branding
and Participation
ORM Customer
Retention, Branding and Participation
WebPR Acquisition
and Branding
Once the
objectives and tactics have been set, these should be cross-checked and
re-evaluated against the needs and resources of your organisation to make sure
your strategy is on the right track and no opportunities are being overlooked.
5.
Metrics:
Metrics
are important in defining what successful value-exchange is worth to an
organisation and how this worth will be measured. This step needs to be
considered in conjunction with value-exchange. As previously discussed, digital
is an empirical medium and digital marketing should start with ROI in mind.
Setting up the analysis and measurement tools early on in the online
strategising phase will enable you to measure returns from inception. The
metrics that matter to your business objectives are referred to as key performance
indicators (KPIs).
6.
Ongoing Optimisation:
The
growing necessity for an organisation to remain dynamic and agile ties in with
metrics and should be considered in the early stages of strategy formulation, as well as being a
continuous process in refining and optimising tactics. The user experience and
journey is vital to building successful brands. Budget should be set aside
upfront to be dedicated to the analysis of user data and the optimisation of
conversion paths.
Social
thinking and socially informed innovation are also valuable and uniquely suited
to the online space. Socially powered insight can be used to inform strategic
decisions and execute on various areas of the organisation, from product
roadmaps to service plans. Brands are beginning to shift from being present in
social media to actively using it, aligning it with actionable objectives and
their corresponding metrics. This is critical in demonstrating ROI and the repeated
impact of social channels on the bottom line.Managing the learning loop (the knowledge
gained from reviewing the performance of your tactics, which can then be fed
back into the strategy) can be difficult. This is because brand cycles often
move more slowly than the realtime results you will see online. It is therefore
important to find a way to work agility into the strategy, allowing you to be
quick and proactive, as opposed to slow and reactive. It may be necessary, for
example, to incorporate constant monitoring into any strategy